Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
November/December 2002 | Volume 53, Issue 6
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
November/December 2002 | Volume 53, Issue 6
There is nothing wrong in revising accepted notions or versions of history. History is revisionist by its very nature. What matters is the purpose of the revisionists. There are umpteen examples of revisionist historians employing documents out of context, citing them only in part, or ignoring or omitting evidence contrary to their theses. Such practices, too, are not new. But what about actual forgeries of documents? Alas, they exist too, and some of them are not easily detectable.
More than a half-century after its ending, there has been less “revisionism” about World War II than about World War I, and, more than a half-century after their deaths, Hitler has fewer defenders than had Napoleon. There have been attempts, here and there, to rehabilitate Hitler (and also Mussolini), most by obsessive revisionists—but some by forgers. There was the 1983 discovery of Hitler’s “diaries,” whose authenticity was soon proved completely false (even though a few eminent historians were briefly taken in by the forgery). There exists another Hitler document that is still questionable. Fragments of his table talk in early 1945, only a few weeks before the collapse of his Reich, and his suicide, were supposed to have been recorded by his minion Martin Bormann. They reflect a Hitler who is not only intelligent but prophetic. They also sound considerably authentic. Yet there is the question of their provenance. They ended up in the hands of François Genoud, a now-deceased Swiss lawyer whose shrewdness, as well as his unflagging admiration for Hitler and for the Third Reich, was truly exceptional. But Genoud would not reveal who had made the typescript, or who had brought it to him, or when and whether it had been edited, so there is some reason to think that these documents were at least partially altered for the purpose of elevating Hitler’s posthumous reputation.
There exist, however, other forgeries whose nature is different. They are meant to exonerate, or at least to revise, Hitler’s reputation by documenting all kinds of disreputable, indeed maleficent, plans on the part of his opponents. This is a shift, one aimed not so much at a whitening of Hitler as at the blackening of Churchill and Roosevelt. (It is detectable in the career of the “revisionist” David Irving, who followed his Hitler’s War with, 10 years later,